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Gold Coast 600

14 November 2017

Driver thoughts

DRIVERS’ VIEW

#5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford

Mark Winterbottom
“The Gold Coast round is a favourite of mine, and we’re looking forward to a new race weekend. Bathurst left a sour taste in our mouths so we definitely want to have a good clean run this weekend and score some points. I think we should have the car pace to run up front, and we aren’t thinking championship at this point, so we’ll go out and push for the podium. Deano and I both have wins at Gold Coast, so it’d be great to get one together, and if we can get two together, that’d be pretty nice as well.”

Practice 1: 5th, 1m11.73sPractice 2 (co-driver, Dean Canto): 5th, 1m11.53sPractice 3: 7th, 1m10.56sMark Winterbottom
“We had a pretty good run. Session one I felt really comfortable. I thought we would’ve gone P1 in that session, which would have been pretty good. But then we just went backwards a little bit in that last session. The car’s not as easy to drive, but the track’s evolved. Definitely not more comfortable in session one than session three but our pace was okay. I dealt with traffic a bit in that last session, so we could probably be P4 on the road. We’ll look at data and try to improve it, but we have been strong and we lost a little bit, so that was sort of how we ended the day.”

#5 The Bottle-O PRA FordStarted: 8th, 1m22.34sFinished: 8thMark Winterbottom
“We had good pace, and I think we would have been on the podium as well if not for the penalty. No mirror in pit lane when you get released, and we hit Chaz. The penalty put us back to 21st or something like that, got back up to eighth, drove pretty well I thought, passed a lot of cars to get back through. But, yeah, sort of the story of the year, if we don’t have bad luck we have no luck at all. Awesome cars, could have been a good result, good for the team, not so good for me, but it is what it is.”Dean Canto
“A bit slow to start off with in the wet conditions, it took me a bit to get going just with the tyre pressures. Once they came up the pace was good. My stint was pretty much survival, a couple guys fired off in front of me, passed a couple guys once I got a bit more confidence in the tyres, and once we handed off to Frosty we were in a reasonable position, but that pit stop didn’t go to plan, then Mark did a really good job to fight back. He did what all he could do, and we got a reasonable finish, but we could have been much higher.” #5 The Bottle-O PRA Ford

Qualified: 5th, 1m10.58sTop Ten Shootout: 8th, 1m11.93sFinished: 5thMark Winterbottom
“It was a good day, nice to finish a race trouble free for a change. It’s been a tough year, tough past couple of rounds, so to get through this one cleanly was nice. Dean did a good job to get us a few spots in his stint, and once I was in fifth was about where we should have ended up. I’m pretty happy to get this kind of result, it’s the kind of momentum we need to finish off the season strong.”Dean Canto
“Going into a dry race when we hadn’t been in the dry since Friday, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All we could go off of was what the guys had in qualifying this morning, which was tough. I got off to a very, very bad start, I actually stalled. I recovered, didn’t lose any spots, and immediately knew the car was quicker than some of the cars in front of me, so I slowly started picking them off and making some moves. The car wasn’t as some of the cars way up front, so I knew it was going to be hard for Mark, but we finished where the car had pace to finish. We still need to do a little better on tyre life, but it was a trouble-free race, which is something we hadn’t had yet.”